Exercise files

Quick reference

Create a Baseline

Baselines store certain pieces of information related to your project so you can compare your original plan to the current plan.

You want this feature because as your project progresses, you will change task durations, and add or remove tasks. As you do this, you will want to make sure you are not missing key dates that were agreed upon earlier in the project negotiations.

Steps

To save a baseline, follow these steps:

Click the Project tab, click the Set Baseline icon, and then select the Set Baseline menu item.

Set the baseline for the entire project, and then click the OK button.

00:04Some congratulations are in order for you.

00:06You just built your first project plan.

00:10You have all of the tasks, durations, predecessors all laid out.

00:14You've addressed resource overallocation issues, and

00:17now it's time to start tracking your project.

00:20Before you start tracking your project, what you want to do is save a baseline.

00:25This way, as tasks get completed and they start early,

00:30start late, you can actually do some comparisons.

00:34So this way, you can tell whether or

00:36not your project is on track to deliver, based on budget and schedule.

00:41I'm going to show you how to set a baseline in this lesson.

00:45Setting a baseline is easy.

00:48Click the Project tab, locate the Schedule section,

00:53click the Set Baseline icon, and then choose the Set Baseline menu item.

01:01At this point, all you need to do is click the OK button, but

01:04let me walk you through a few of the various settings here.

01:09First, you can see there's a baseline option selected in this pick list.

01:14If I expand the list, you can see that there's also a one through ten.

01:20Now, most of the out-of-the-box views within Microsoft Project just use

01:24baseline.

01:25And what's gonna happen when we choose this,

01:28is it's actually going to copy a lot of the settings, like the duration,

01:32the start, the finish, to extra fields called the baseline fields.

01:38This way, when we change our project,

01:40we can compare our current schedule against the baseline.

01:45So essentially, we're making a copy of our schedule.

01:48And there's some limitations to that, which I'll discuss in a few moments.

01:52There's a baseline one through ten as well.

01:55I do not suggest that you use these as you get started.

01:59Just focus on using the baseline.

02:01As you get more advanced, you'll find various uses for these baselines.

02:07There's also this option to set an interim plan.

02:10And here is where you can actually set additional fields where you want to copy

02:15project data.

02:15We're not going to use that, because that's a more advanced topic.

02:20You can also choose just selected tasks and

02:24decide how you want the summaries to roll up.

02:26Again, more of a advanced topic.

02:30So we're just going to choose entire project.

02:33And this is a setting that most people use when they use

02:36the baseline feature in Project.

02:38Click the OK button.

02:41Nothing really exciting happened here.

02:43We click the OK button and everything kind of looks the same in our project.

02:48However, things aren't the same in the background.

02:50As a matter of fact, every task and

02:53every assignment on your project can have hundreds of fields associated with them.

02:59For example, here in this Gantt Chart view we have right now, we have Task Name,

03:02Duration, Predecessor, Start, Finish, Resource Name, but

03:07there's hundreds more fields.

03:08Let's just right-click on the Duration column and

03:14choose Insert Column and type Baseline Duration and press Enter.

03:20And here you can see this is a copy of the duration for our baseline.

03:27So if this is our baseline, the copy, and

03:30this is our working duration, our current estimate,

03:35if I change this duration to let's say 40 days,

03:39you can see here that this baseline duration never changed.

03:45And that's because we wanna use this for comparative purposes.

03:50I'll go ahead and remove Baseline Duration from this view by right-clicking and

03:55choosing Hide Column.

03:57When you choose Hide Column,

03:59ignore this little X here that makes it look like you're deleting things.

04:02You're not.

04:02You're just hiding the column.

04:05Let's go to the View tab.

04:08And let's click the Tables pick list.

04:12And choose Variance.

04:14Microsoft already set up a few different views for

04:17us that allow us to look at variance.

04:21So if we just expand a few things here,

04:29What we can see is the start date and the finish date for

04:33our project, then the baseline start, and the baseline finish.

04:41What you can see here is that there’s a finish of 12/1/15,

04:47but the baseline finish was 11/13/2015,

04:52with a finish variance of ten days.

04:57Now why do all these other things say ten days?

05:00Well, remember that we have a task that's red that's on the critical path.

05:05So what we've essentially done is we've modified that duration and

05:11it's affected all of the following tasks, right down to the end of the project.

05:17So this is where the power of the baseline comes in, and I'll

05:21be showing you with reports how you can even make more use of this baseline field.